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For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Power
- beejiu 9y agoIf you ever get the opportunity to visit a power station, you should definitely do so. I visited the coal-fired station in Tilbury when it was running and I was amazed at the sheer scale of the operation. The tour showed how the coal was processed, the water processing plant, the turbine hall, the control room and you could even stand at the bottom of an offline furnace and feel the incredible heat from the other furnace (connected by a tunnel).
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoDid this emerge from routine operations, or was there a directed effort to have a "coal-free day"? The article didn't seem to clearly say either way.
- jacquesm 9y agoRoutine operations: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/21/britain-set-for-first-coal-free-day-since-the-industrial-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/21/britain-... So simply the result of the shifting energy source mix.
- johansch 9y agoNext up Germany and Poland, please. http://www.coalmap.eu/#/climate-problem http://www.coalmap.eu/#/climate-problem
- Safety1stClyde 9y agoThe Germans switched off their nuclear power "to save the environment", which is why they have to burn coal, because the solar and wind aren't stable enough to supply consistent power. They also had to switch off some of their wind farms.
- johansch 9y agoGerman 'environmentalists' (I use that word ironically) are indeed something else. They did this after Fukushima. Are they afraid there'll be a baltic sea tsunami?
- detaro 9y agoTo be fair, it wasn't the environmentalists who suddenly got the urge to do this after Fukushima: the anti-nuclear movement had been talking about that for decades, and surely not for fears of "baltic sea tsunamis". Fukushima was when the then-current government suddenly found it opportune to quickly reverse their reversal of the plan to slowly phase out nuclear power. And how to deal with energy mix problems is a topic with widely varying opinions among people you might classify as environmentalists.
- johansch 9y agoAre you saying the german anti-nuclear people are largely distinct from the german 'environmentalists'?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- detaro 9y agoI'm not sure why you think I'm saying that. My comment primarily points out that framing it as something that "environmentalists did on a whim after Fukushima, because Tsunamis oh so funny" is gross misrepresentation. Also that "environmentalist" is a very broad label. It's not like being anti-nuclear is a niche sentiment. A large percentage of the general population is "anti-nuclear" in that they support existing plans (=laws) to phase out nuclear power. E.g. in 2010, before Fukushima, ~50 % didn't want delays to the plans, and only 25 % supported large delays to it. The government added delays. Fukushima happened, and within days they changed their opinion back and reaffirmed the old plans (more or less). If you look at people more actively supporting the movement, sometimes being part of it since decades ago, when it was a niche opinion, I'd say in many cases they are less motivated by protecting the environment in general than they are by protecting humans, or protesting bad policies. But there is of course a big overlap with environmentalists.
- ed_balls 9y agoPeople are scared of nuclear in Poland due to the accident in the neighbour country, but it will have to happen. It's sustainable to mine bituminous coal for 20 years. Lignite will stay a bit longer unless solar or thorium will take over.
- johansch 9y agoI just sorta assumed they didn't care much beyond the pure economics? (Maybe that's what you are saying.)
- philipkglass 9y agoIt's worse than that. Poland's government is giving preferential treatment to coal fired electricity even when other sources are cheaper. They're deliberately obstructing renewables because Poland is already oversupplied with coal and coal-fired electricity. Polish coal mines have repeatedly been unable to turn a profit and rescued only by government subsidies: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-coal-idUSKCN0XC209 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-coal-idUSKCN0XC209 Paying extra money to cut emissions is one thing. Paying over-market rates to prop up the filthiest fuel around is really perverse. But it happens, directly and indirectly, wherever there are Coal Jobs to save. I've noticed similar propping in Australia, Germany, India, USA, China, and Czechia too. If a group of workers is politically weak they get screwed over when they're no longer needed. If the workers are politically powerful they want the rest of society to subsidize their refusal to change. I don't know if anywhere has achieved a happy medium where workers in obsolete industries aren't abandoned by the rest of society yet are willing to walk toward the future instead of digging their heels in against it.
- codeisawesome 9y agoDo you mean Czechoslovakia?
- philipkglass 9y agoI thought they were calling themselves Czechia now but it looks like the announced name change hasn't really caught on yet.
- corndoge 9y agothis headline is clickbait, I'm sure at least one person in Britain burned coal for power today
- Safety1stClyde 9y agoMaybe for heat, but not to generate electricity.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoMaybe for heat, but it's pretty unusual. I don't know of anyone who still uses coal for heat. It's extremely rare to see coal smoke coming out of chimneys and local delivery coal lorries are all but extinct now. Plus it's pretty warm in the UK at the moment, most central heating is off and will be until Autumn.
- _delirium 9y agoHere in the middle of nowhere, rural England, I know quite a few people who still use coal for heat. Mainly it's people who live in houses that were built with coal fireplaces in each room. These are very shallow fireplaces where you couldn't burn wood or pellets, really designed only to hold coal. Some of these are surprisingly new, built as late as the 1950s. Even most of those properties have now been converted to gas or electric heat, but if gas wasn't available (or the owner wasn't willing to pay the installation cost), for many years, coal remained cheaper than electric heating, so some properties are left. The local department store sells two kind of coal at retail to cater to such customers, something I have never seen in any other country. But yes, I doubt anyone is using it this week, as it's not cold enough.
- stygiansonic 9y agoOntario has been coal-free for a few years: http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/supply-overview/transmission-connected-generation http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/supply-overview/transmission-c... There are many confounding factors (recession in 2008-2009) but generally, the number of days with smog advisories has been on the decline in Ontario as well: http://airqualityontario.com/history/aqi_advisories_stats.php http://airqualityontario.com/history/aqi_advisories_stats.ph... Note that in general, across North America (not sure about the world at large) electricity consumption per capita has also been on the decline, to the extent that overall/absolute electricity consumption is down in large areas like Ontario[1]. I haven't done any research, but I surmise this is due to factors like more energy-efficient devices and time-of-day usage being pushed onto the retail user. (In additional to the aforementioned recession causing loss of manufacturing/factories) 1. http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-demand http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-dem...
- jszymborski 9y agoUnsure how related it is, but within Canada, Ontario's energy is notoriously expesive [0] [0] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-does-electricity-cost-so-much-in-ontario/article33453270/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-does-electr...
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoAnd yet merely average in the context of the rest of North America. But you'd never know it from the rantings of people in Ontario, who feel very persecuted.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoIf my local area had to pay the global average but my local region mostly paid much less I'd be pissed as hell too. You might as well tell as starving kid in Appalachia to suck it up because people starve in Africa too.
- Deinumite 9y ago
- delsarto 9y agoWhat's the deal with natural gas? It doesn't seem "renewable"; isn't it extracted just like petrol? Is it just that it burns cleaner? Doesn't burning it still produce carbon dioxide?
- jacquesm 9y agoYes, it burns cleaner (a lot cleaner, coal plants need scrubbers on the stacks). NG also is easier to transport (pipelines rather than hauling it with vehicles or boats) and does not cause the release of radioactive particles (which coal does do).
- maxerickson 9y agoNatural gas also results in significantly less C02 released per unit of energy produced. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11
- jessriedel 9y agoTo save others a click: it's slightly less than a factor of two better. 214-228 lbs C02 per btu, vs. 117 for natural gas.
- maxerickson 9y agoYou also have to factor in the differences in the plants. So I guess it often works out to slightly more than a factor of two. The other side of it is that unburned coal doesn't leak into the air as a potent greenhouse gas the way methane does.
- pacaro 9y agoThe other side of the waste equation is also worse for coal. Fly ash is typically radioactive enough that if it were produced at a nuclear facility it would be categorized as nuclear waste. To be clear, burning coal concentrates the uranium and thorium that naturally occur in coal by a factor of about 10. There is still only a very small amount. Living within the stack shadow (~1km) of a coal fired plant only increases your exposure to background radiation by about 5%
- sid-kap 9y ago> Last year, the share of coal in total power generation dropped to 9 percent, down from 23 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2012. How have they done this so quickly?
- peteretep 9y agohttp://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk Gas
- chillydawg 9y agogas, nukes, wind turbines.
- Hnrobert42 9y agoWelp, time to institute a travel ban on the Brits.
- sctb 9y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantively like this?
- pierrec 9y agoHaving an interest in ethnomusicology, my favorite testimony of Britain's tumultuous dropping of coal is the song Coal Not Dole. It's originally a poem written by the wife of a laid-off coal miner. Dropping coal may be considered inevitable in retrospect - but it's interesting to see the perspective of people caught up in these changes, whose lives were disrupted and sometimes ruined in the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk2hGp6HCn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk2hGp6HCn8 It stands so proud, the wheel so still A ghost-like figure on the hill It seems so strange, there is no sound Now there are no men underground What will become of this pit-yard Where men once trampled, faces hard? Tired and weary, their work done Never having seen the sun Will it become a sacred ground? Foreign tourists gazing round Asking if men once worked here Way beneath this pit-head gear Empty trucks once filled with coal Lined up like men on the dole Will they e're be used again Or left for scrap just like the men? There'll always be a happy hour For those with money, jobs and power They'll never realise the hurt They cause to men they treat like dirt
- notgood 9y agoI wish to die if that's enough for next generations to live But it isn't enough I've to do A little more I've to leave fellow men without jobs because evolution only cares about survival in short term but i can care and that's my burden I care enough to kill your son if that means a million more will live without cancer without smoke without wondering if tomorrow the air will be breathed or will be chocked
- pacaro 9y agoIt's a social challenge that we still haven't worked out how to meet. Prior to the industrial revolution there were small rural communities, hamlets, villages, and towns, in places which grew up to be coal towns. But when the single economic driver disappears we don't know how to scale these communities back down. I've always moved to where the work is, and I see the much same in my family tree all the way back to the industrial revolution (including mining engineers and mining machinery makers on my fathers side, who don't seem to have spent more than 10-20 years in any one coal field). But I know that many people are much more rooted in place. Forcing people to move isn't palatable in the U.K., but waiting for communities to disintegrate and people to move out on there own seems equally cruel
- pash 9y agoThis is an astoundingly vapid article. If you want to understand why and how the UK has so quickly reduced the amount of coal it burns, Carbon Brief has a much more informative overview [0]. The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible. The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU's electrical sector's total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed. That wasn't really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet. So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible. 0. http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-coal-drop http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co... 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trad... 2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floor-reform https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floo...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pcjedi 9y agoEarth doesn't care where its coal gets burned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
- grzm 9y agoYes, a global perspective is important. That said, I think it's appropriate to regard Britain's going without coal for a day as an accomplishment. It shows that a country with a history of using coal can go without. Given your comment, this is something you care about. Do you see nothing positive in this submission?
- pcjedi 9y agoNothing positive or negative about it. Call me a destructive pessimist but I've thought a lot about this topic and I'm pretty sure that mankind will burn up all Cole that it can get its hands on (same for oil, gas and uranium). The first figure in the Wikipedia article backs me up at this point. On the world map of Cole reserves, GB is a white spot now. Instead of celebrating such acomplishments that are neglectable in the Longview we should think about the implications of burning up all fossils.
- Animats 9y agoSome plants have been converted partially to burn biomass, such as wood pellets. Worse than coal for pollution.
- konschubert 9y agoBetter for the climate.
- clort 9y agoSurely something that emitted pure greenhouse gases, no large particles or soot but disastrous for the climate would be pollution, by definition? I'm thinking that better for the climate (wood pellets) but worse for (what GP defines as) pollution is a trade off, and probably people are going to argue about that balance, but at the end of the day if we pollute the planet today and just hope our grandchildren will be able to fix the problem or suffer the consequences then that is pretty poor.
- rleigh 9y agoNot when the wood is coming from non-renewable sources. I've read much is sourced from the US, and is not from quickly-growing softwood but long established slow-growing hardwood which burns better in power plants. When the end goal is to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, destroying carbon sinks and burning them is one of the most counterproductive activities you could engage in. There's a reason we stopped burning wood as our primary fuel source several hundred years ago. There's not enough to burn, and it doesn't renew fast enough to satisfy demand. Coal met that demand. Returning to wood makes zero sense, unless you want to satisfy a short-term legal/policy goalpost at the expense of missing the bigger picture. Personally, I think that while reducing coal is a laudable medium-term goal, this is not better for the climate. Whether you burn wood or coal, both are producing CO2, but when you burn wood your are also reducing the size of an important carbon sink.
- m-i-l 9y agoI wonder if they have data going back to the 1800s to actually back this up. In the 1970s, for example, the country faced day-long blackouts[0] due to industrial action by coal miners (I think limited electricity was still generated for hospitals etc. using existing coal stocks, but there were other sources of energy at the time such as nuclear power plants). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
- manis404 9y agoI think the article is misleading. British women still are the biggest coal burners that exist.
- corradio 9y agoLive view, including other countries: http://www.electricitymap.org http://www.electricitymap.org